Briefing

The impact of policy uncertainty on U. S. employment: industry evidence

Abstract: The anemic pace of the recovery of the U. S. economy from the Great Recession has frequently been blamed on heightened uncertainty, much of which concerns the nation?s fiscal policy. Intuition suggests that increased policy uncertainty likely has different impacts on different industries, to the extent that industries differ in their exposure to government policies. This study utilizes industry data to explore whether policy uncertainty indeed affects the dynamics of employment, and particularly its impact on industry employment, during this recovery. This analysis focuses on heterogeneity across industries in terms of the fraction of their product demand that can ultimately be attributed to federal government expenditures. The estimation results reveal that policy uncertainty indeed retards employment growth more in industries that rely more heavily on federal government demand: the growth rate of employment in these industries appears to have been four-tenths of a percentage point lower during the quarters in recent years when policy uncertainty spiked.

Keywords: hours; industry accounts; fiscal policy; employment; input-output tables; uncertainty;

JEL Classification: D80; E66; D57; L50; E24; G18;

Bibliographic Information

Provider: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston

Part of Series: Public Policy Brief

Publication Date: 2013

Order Number: 3